What I knew

The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by Amy Tan during the late 1980’s in San Francisco. I haven’t heard of this book before, but now it’s going to be part of our academic reading for this term. Our teacher told us that the book is about the love of their own mothers and their relations with their own daughters. We read the introduction and few more pages from the first chapter “Feathers from a Thousand Li Away”. It seems that the book is going to be sad as well as fascinating. What I knew after reading first few pages is that a Chinese woman bought a swan before immigrating to America. She wanted to give the swan as a gift to her daughter. Unfortunately, the immigration officials in America seized the swan and left the mother with just a feather. What do you think is the significance of the swan?

The daughter grows up as the mother wished her to be. The mother wanted to give the feather to her daughter and let her know about its specialty, but she hold back because there was communication gap between them. The daughter speaks the perfect American English, so it was hard for her to understand the words of her mom. At first, I thought it was absurd for a daughter that could not understand her mother’s language, but after proper realization I came to infer that her mother came from China and her English isn’t good and fluent; her daughter was born and was grown up in American society, so her English is perfect. The story is being narrated from the daughter’s (Jing Mei Woo) point of view giving introduction to her mother. From my point of view, I feel that “The Joy Luck Club” is a kind of organization coordinated by her mother and other Chinese immigrated women. I wonder on what basis and on what assumption did her mother open up the Joy Luck club. Is it something that would be helpful for the women and the society especially for the Chinese immigrants? As a whole, I feel that he story is going to depict the distance within the family due to different cultural adaptions. I am very eager to read the rest of the parts sooner, and through reading this novel, we come to know about various Chinese dialect and their cultures. Because there was distance between Jing Mei and her mother, could there be a chance that Jing Mei maintains distance with her own daughter?